The Girl with Three Fathers

In 2011, when this novel opens, 30–something Tooly Zylberberg owns an unsuccessful bookshop in a small town in Wales. The second chapter takes us back to 1999, when a younger Tooly is trying to walk every street in the five boroughs of New York City. In the third chapter, it is 1988 and nine-year-old Tooly is leaving Australia with a man named Paul, who promises that the next place they are going to live (which turns out to be Bangkok) will be better. What is going on here, as Tooly’s assistant in the bookshop says in another context, is “a bit of a mystery story.” And it deepens. Gradually, very gradually, the reader discovers that Tooly has one mother, a textbook-case narcissist, and three father figures, two well-meaning but weak, and one fatally charming and corrupting. Rachman does not reveal the identity of Tooly’s mother until near the 150-page mark, and that of her biological father remains unknown for about three quarters of the...